RPI Day 9

 Day 9 and final day of the RPI today.

Was a great session today - learning more, recapping, then reflecting and evaluating.

I am thinking about how to sustain what I have learned in my practice, as well as implement some learnings that I have not had a chance to do properly yet.  

Most important is making sure I continue to build a love of reading. Part of this that I still need to embed is the sharing what you are reading with an authentic audience. I intend to do this with show and tell time and with library time, in conjunction with the librarian.

It was reiterated today how powerful the sharing of any create task is because of the many exposures to the learning it supports (Visibility - feedback and reflection- collaborate - whanau engagement and authentic audience sharing) . I will use Schoolltalk reflection and upload functions better to help achieve this, but I do note that the Schooltalk learning log is not as conducive to an audience commenting as a Google site is.

Second, if  I maintain a really structured lesson delivery - learners WILL make more than a year's progress in a year. Some of the important factors are :keeping an eye on the text coverage, Integrating where you can across the curriculum, keeping up with vocabulary teaching and practice, consistently requiring hIgher order thinking skills, ensuring I have routine opportunities to collaborate and build agency, improving my level and quality of feedback and make it more rewindable, and getting whanau more involved, and to track independent work closely. I also need to embed effective instructional strategies and tools as appropriate across the village team.

My spreadsheet helps to remind me of all my learnings, and my progress in implementing, embedding and sustaining them. 

Thank you to the amazing presenters on this course.

RPI Day 8

 Friday 21.8.26  Day 8 RPI

Today was about short form and long form create tasks (and getting some hands on practice). It was reiterated that digital affordances help with the capturing and sharing of analog create tasks- they don't have to be the task itself.  An important point was that create tasks help instill a desire to be producers not just passive consumers of content (which also helps in their critical consuming of content online) . It can hook in those learners who need the endgame to cement the learning they may have tuned out of.

It is good to have routines and familiar structures ,for example Graphic Organisers, when doing short form create tasks, so learners don't need to keep learning new things and can focus on the learning. 

Same with long form create tasks - don't want to keep learning new apps. Find good ones - eg google vids, adobe podcasting. 

Add choice and collaboration with longer form create tasks. Allow space to develop soft skills and agency.

Actions:

• Think about short and tight vs longer and looser forms of create and where they fit into my program. Where are my gaps? How can I add more choice and the opportunity to improve collaboration skills?

• 1 minute book review - get librarian to be involved - use google meet or vid, or a google site that kids access when they have library. . Could also incorporate book reviews into the next round of show and tell, or into our school news.

• Adobe Podcasting - how can I use this

RPI Day 7:

I missed this day due to a clash of PLDs. I have subsequently read slides (thank you for being so rewindable) and noted the following.

• The discussion about cybersmart was interesting. The 5/6  team has implemented Squiz kids recently which is an Australian set of lessons for thinking critically with media. So that’s a tick.

• The discussion about AI, and the balance between using it and cognitive offloading, was good. I will use the “Keep AI out of the gym” analogy. Define our routine goals (use it) versus our cognitive growth goals (don’t use it)

• Higher order thinking: ensure we are always incorporating the interpretive and evaluative levels of thinking in our comprehension questions after our reading. There were great examples of this in the course.

• 

• A reminder that before reading always give them a purpose for reading such as “ as you read , see if you can work out …. Or notice…..”

• I liked the definition that "analysis' is the opposite of “summarising’.  (Breaking into elements and looking at it from different perspectives, revealing the connections and relationships, to understand the whole better).

• Annotating a PDF was fun

• I need to think again about how we can increase the visibility and rewindability of key ideas (modelling book/flip chart/better slides...)

• When analysing text : 

• Zooming in at word level (eg deconstructing figurative language to get to the meaning) Use these templates to help interpret fig lang

• Zooming out to make connections to big ideas. 

• Teachable moments where you notice and point our stereotypes or absence of representation OR explicit teaching of critical literacy through your text selection

• Critical discussions - GOAL : Over time, we want to build learners’ independence about ways they can effectively lead, and contribute to, any discussion.   

• Plan for learners to have self-managed small group discussions (away from the teacher) knowing we have established a culture of safe, collaborative and purposeful discussion “to get to the bottom of an issue or problem”. THE TEXT should always be at the centre of the discussion.

• CRITICAL ANALYST Role Prompts

Challenging the group’s thinking….

• I agree/disagree because….

• Does anyone disagree with what …… is saying?

• I think differently (or the same) because …

• I think there is another reason ….?

• What evidence is there …. ?

• But how do we know that?

• But what would happen if …?

• But is that what the question is asking …

Discussing alternatives …

• We haven’t heard from anyone who thinks differently ….

• If someone disagreed, what would that person say?

Challenging the group’s protocols…

• Are we answering the question … (or getting off topic)?

• Are we making sure everyone gets a chance to speak?

• Do we need to change / revise our ground rules for discussion by ….?

• Can we put our points forward in a better way such as …..?

• I will ensure that learners read (parts of) multiple texts, rather than just one at a time, so they have to notice differences across texts and synthesise information.  There are very few tasks in life now where a person should rely on just one information source. Eg “Contrasting texts could illustrate how one text minimises the social impact of an event or presents a problem from an ethnocentric or gender-based viewpoint.” 

 Day 6 RPI Vocabulary

To reach the goal of 20,000 word vocabulary of a literate person, we need to acquire 700 words a year ! So… I need to focus even more strongly on vocab teaching. It is also the strongest predictor of reading comprehension. 

We went through lots of ways to explicitly teach vocab. I need to choose more tier two words per text than I normally do - 5-8 per text. I also want to do more empowering of students to make and design their own but remembering that although apps can support word exposure they do not substitute for rich text encounters. Text in the centre always.

I am already working hard to build a love of words, to increase word consciousness and word knowledge over the last month or so in my class, and will continue this. I have been surprised at how much the learners enjoy picking apart words during spelling time.

There have been lots of great examples of how to bring in multiple exposures with interactive puzzles and wordplay like morpheme matrices, which I will incorporate. Perhaps having a rebus on screen for when learners are settling in their seats. I love the idea of inventing fake words to crack  using morphology in some fun multimodal activities. I currently have a word wall and a sentence structure wall, which learners love, but could also have a morphology wall they can manipulate.

I also like the spotlight on words for before and after reading, to focus their attention on important tier two words when reading then getting a sense of success when they know it at the end.

I am going to have a look at lots of the provided links and resources in the holidays eg the morphology project. We currently have a morphology scope and sequence but it doesn't seem very good.

I also want to try reciprocal reading so will read up on the efficacy of that too.

Links and actions 

1. toolkit.manaikalani.org  / ask a facilitator to help with tools? Secure gemini as only a learning tool?

2. Choose 5-8  tier two words from each text

3. Morphology wall to manipulate like our sentence structure one

4. RPI spotlight on words - before and after reading

5. NS Copy of Base Words Plus Suffix

6. Session 7: Morphology (Chapter 12) Orton Gillingham Teachers Manual 2019 

7. Session 7: The Morphology Project

8. Session 7: Spelling Progressions (United Kingdom)

9. Session 7: Matrix Maker (prefix, root/base, suffix

Improvement Mahi presentation to staff Term 2 Week 7

 

 RPI. Post Day 5 : Planning a reading program

There are a lot of factors to consider about timetabling and fitting everything in. Today was certainly aspirational and an opportunity to see what others ideas are and what could be possible. 

I would like to think more deeply about using an overall curriculum tracker like the example here as it is potentially simpler and more effective than what we do. 

We are doing well with our learner tracking doc. However,  the work done in books may not be well reflected in the tracking doc, which means things in two different places.

 I still think our visibility to learners and parents could be better (incl rewindability) through schooltalk so will revisit how I link my digital slides into schooltalk so they can more easily see across a week. 

I also want to have something that makes it clearer to learners what they need to have completed by the end of each week. I do what the expectations are by the end of each day well, but could be clearer about the bigger picture, especially for learners looking at their work with parents at home, which more of our parents want.

I need to work out how to better spend more explicit time with my target learners (they are mostly on the same table). At the moment, I spend time with them while others are doing the same task independently. (This is what we were encouraged to do on the SL PLD. Have target and extn learners close by to scaffold and extend in the moment.). Sometimes this is not enough time though, or too disjointed.

Definitely will utilise the Epic and Readworks better, for text searching and questions. Need to work out how to track completion of these activities though.

We work the idea of reading like writers and writing like readers , and integration, into our lessons very well.

We use SL in our spelling (Code) and targets have an intervention group for 20 mins per 4 days, but I need to increase morphology and etymology into spelling and vocab building better.

 BLOG Day 4

Today was useful as it helped consolidate many activities I already do, plus added a few more. I want to ensure I am doing all of the following in a wider reading programme:

Reading aloud to learners (eg feed and read or modelling), shared reading (maybe before deconstructing texts together), small group instruction, paired reading (usually whole class), independent reading (independent activities)  and recreational reading (in the Library, sometimes SSR).

For every text:

• Text purpose/ Introduce text

• Observe learners reading

• Brief Discussion

• Precise teaching points

• Independent followup to consolidate learning

• focused word work

• Reflection time

The concept of rewindable learning was good. We have shared slides which are all accessible through Schooltalk for learners and whanau and teachers to revisit, but I am wondering if it is user friendly enough for learners and whanau if the week has gone by and they want to find it again. 

Building knowledge together - purposefully and equitably. Front load vocabulary. Keep the focus on the LI when reading a text - keep coming back to the purpose and using specific evidence from the text.

Listening to reading - ensuring I hear everyone read - using digital if needed - every 2 weeks ish. I liked the fluency rubric. I need to break this down and model for learners rather than doing everything at once. I also need to have a specific teaching point when doing fluency reading practice eg intonation. Pace should come in last.

I need to reflect with the team on if just a simple recording is better than Snorkl where the feedback is from AI. In other words, I think the feedback and evaluation would be better coming from themselves or another learner against a rubric.

For discussions. I need to ensure I always review and embed ground rules and ensure they know it is a learning discussion not a test  for example say: “OK we are having a learning conversation now”

Questioning

Ensure I am using all types of questions in my followups and discussions, and that it is learner led, provoking questions that will build conversation, not just elicit a single answer that nobody builds on. Try this with a smaller group.

This Fountas and Pinnell cycle for small group text work is useful. The LI can be brought in during explicit work (teaching points)